Northern Virginia - 2 posts

Photo by Mandy McLaren / Nathaniel Nyok, left, and John Leek, center, sing in Dinka at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Old Town.

| By Mandy McLaren and Sara Wise |

The worshippers arrived in their Sunday best. Bibles were readied, children were shushed, and, with the beat of an African drum, Easter services began.

The congregation alternated easily between bowed prayer and risen song, as the sounds of Dinka – the language of South Sudan’s largest ethnic tribe – resonated in the eaves of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where prayers had echoed in English just hours before.

The more than two-dozen South Sudanese seated among the church pews hold this time together sacred. They gather weekly at St. Paul’s in Alexandria. There, they reconnect to a place their hearts never left.

Just six years ago, South Sudan gained its independence. Many refugees here and across the U.S. believed a long-awaited return home was finally in reach.

“When you get that country you’ve been waiting for for years, it’s an unimaginable feeling,” said Chol Isaac Achuil, 36, one of the nearly 4,000 South Sudanese refugees resettled across the U.S. in the early 2000s. Known internationally as the “lost boys of Sudan,” many earned college degrees at American universities, intent on one day rebuilding their country.

Vibha Chawla of Ashburn, Va., wonders how to explain Hinduism to her teenage son and daughter.

“They have a hundred questions,” she says. Although she grew up in India, she isn’t sure how to answer them. Hinduism doesn’t have creeds or pillars to summarize the faith, in contrast to Christianity or Islam. Understanding Hindu ideas takes study, even for those born and raised with the religion. So Chawla researches her kids’ questions in ways familiar to Americans of all faiths: “I Google. I call my Mom.”

Pandit Moti Lal Sharma, a priest at Rajdhani Mandir in Chantilly, Va., answers a question from Vibha Chawla of Ashburn in the community hall after dinner. / Photo by Jessamine Price

Chawla wears an elegant blue dress in an Indian style as she stakes out a table for her parents in the empty community hall at Rajdhani Mandir, a temple in Chantilly, Va. It’s a cool Saturday evening in mid-April. The prayer hall upstairs is busy with music and blessings for Mata Jagrans, a celebration of the Goddess Durga, just one of the many forms God takes in Hinduism. Priests and worshippers gather around a creamy, polished, life-size icon of Durga, a serene, smiling Goddess with a thousand arms, each grasping a weapon, riding a lion into battle to save the world.

In a few minutes, temple volunteers will serve a spicy vegetarian dinner to hundreds of worshippers. The tables in the community hall fill up quickly. A few families end up sitting cross-legged on the stage used for occasional cultural performances. Chawla, who has lived in the United States for 22 years, knows it will get crowded and is wise to claim a spot early for the sake of her elderly mother’s knees and back.